McClellan goes on Olbermann last night to talk about his book and says something destined to outrage the 28 pecenters, but which makes perfect, unfortunate sense for everyone else:

I think that you would need to take [the administration’s] comments [on Iran] very seriously and be skeptical.

There are three problems inherent in this. The first is the possibility that the administration has already planned to attack Iran, public opinion be damned. There have long been signals that this is the case, though of course we won’t know until we suddenly have “irrefutable proof” of Iranian attacks on Americans which must be repaid. We see occasional half-hearted claims to this end, but nothing forceful, at least not yet.

But that brings us to the second problem: It is entirely possible that the administration is not lying about Iran’s role in Iraq. It’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome; for so long, this administration has used fear to buttress its case, how can anyone believe they’re doing anything but the same now? The credibility is shot, at a time when that’s more dangerous than it would normally be.

The third problem, then, is how the press reacts to any obvious push by the administration toward war.

The McClellan book/stories have unleashed an unprecedented amount of navel-gazing from the national media; McClellan writes of how the media was “too deferential” to the president, but the likes of Brian Williams and Charles Gibson have denied it; others have acknowledged it.

I remember watching all of this as it was happening and getting the feeling that the national media was too excited at the prospect of a war - a major event - to see things clearly, especially in the wake of 9/11, when there was indeed a pronounced “patriotic” feeling in the country. I remember watching the breathless reports from “embedded” correspondents as they crossed the border into Iraq and thinking that they - their news organizations - were so exicted by the prospect of being there that they neglected to ask whether we should have been there. The war was clearly going to be big news; no one wanted to miss out on big news.

I don’t think, as some critics seem to believe, that it was a conspiracy; but clearly the big media were deferential; as Glenn Greenwald has been saying all week, Phil Donahue got his show yanked off the air even though, at the time, his was the highest-rated show on MSNBC; Ashleigh Banfield got canned for saying coverage of the war “wasn’t journalism.”

Those incidents alone are enough to cow anyone else in the profession thinking about calling bull****. You get a sense of the way the wind is blowing, as you would in any other profession.

But the wind is clearly blowing in the opposite direction now. The performance of the national media in the run-up to war clearly made the war possible; but the media has been so roundly criticized that it cannot possibly swallow the upcoming claims for war with Iran whole, as it did with Iraq in 2002-2003. Tougher questions must and will be asked this time around, if only to prove that, hey - we’re not in the can. And that, then, will make launching a war against Iran harder. As, really, it should.

Or, the media could get mired knee-deep in the hoopla once again. It’s not real comforting when outlets like Politico, helmed by a former Washington Post and Time reporter, routinely refers to those who thought the media has been too deferential to the administration as “left wing haters.” If only “left-wing haters” dare doubt the official line, and such outfits need to be “fair and balanced” - doesn’t that indicate that Iraq wasn’t a one-off failure, but the way and wave of a very dangerous future?